For a long time, when I told people that LINBIT® helps secure data, I would occasionally hear the reply, “You secure data from bad actors, so you are providing something like a firewall.”
Then, of course, I replied with an explanation that LINBIT is about data replication and that users mainly want it to protect their valuable data from loss due to hardware device failure.
However, a recent conversation has caused me to rethink.
Ransomware paired with blackmail has become a massive threat and a major business model for bad actors. Just picking one example, the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack, which, according to Wikipedia, cost £50 million per week. As reported, production came to a halt for nearly the entire month of September 2025. According to my calculations, the approximate cost for the organization was £200 million. The linked article states that the cost to the UK economy was $2.5 billion. More research unveiled terms like Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), indicating the professionalization of the sector.
Unsurprisingly, such risks fuel the cybersecurity industry on the other side, too, which includes cyber-risk insurances. Insurance companies offering financial compensation to mitigate attack damage have a vested interest in their insured clients protecting themselves using cybersecurity products.
So far, I was aware of firewalls, virus checkers, EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response), and XDR (Extended Detection and Response). A firewall screens network packets and allows or denies them based on rules. A virus checker scans files for patterns. EDR is looking for suspicious activities on devices running software (computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc.). Additionally, XDR combines the findings of multiple EDR sensors and also includes setting countermeasures.
However, all of that no longer helps when the ransomware has infected the critical production site.
The next step in a cybersecurity plan is to reinstall and bootstrap the production site, automating the process within an hour (not weeks), and recover the data from a disaster recovery site. It is at this point that I finally see how cybersecurity connects to what LINBIT does. LINBIT’s products enable you to replicate data over long distances for quite some time. That includes retrieving it from the disaster-recovery site and returning it to the main production site. That includes taking periodic snapshots (e.g., every 10 minutes) to enable quick point-in-time recovery.
Data replication and backups are distinctly different, but they are closely related.
A recent LINBIT blog post, “Backing up or Migrating a Kubernetes Deployment by Using Velero & LINSTOR”, aptly touches on this topic and highlights a disaster recovery (backup and restore) use case. Moving on to other recent LINBIT content: “Production-ready High Availability for Proxmox VE with LINSTOR” is an overview post that provides you with a basis for exploring using LINSTOR® for shared storage in Proxmox VE.
We’ve also taken the time to review and update a couple of existing posts. First, “Create a Highly Available iSCSI Target Using a LINSTOR Gateway Cluster” shows you how to set up a highly available iSCSI target by using LINSTOR Gateway. Second, “Highly Available NFS for Proxmox With LINSTOR Gateway” reveals the benefits of adding highly available NFS shares to a Proxmox Virtual Environment.
The newly released software updates since I last wrote are the LINSTOR Proxmox plugin v8.2.0 and DRBD® Reactor v1.11.0.
